Myanmar tycoon Thein Tun, the man famous for introducing his country to Pepsi Cola, says he regrets becoming the owner of the Myanmar Times, which he still owns.
“In 2014, I did a stupid thing – I bought the Myanmar Times. I had a gut feeling to buy it, but it doesn’t make money,” Thein Tun told Forbes in a profile published this week that traces the ups and downs of the 82-year-old’s career. In telling the story of his family empire, the Myanma Golden Star Group, Thein Tun also describes the unfulfilled dream of Myanmar transforming into a good place to do business.
Myanma Golden Star Group, which includes trading, property development, banking, and manufacturing branches, was among the first local companies to fill in the vacuum left at the end of colonial rule. But sanctions during Burma’s military dictatorship years and declining foreign investment and tourism since the start of the Rohingya refugee crisis have kept Thein Tun’s annual profits in the low millions.
The magnate says he has continued to pump money into failing businesses in order to “build up the image of our country.” Part of this strategy, is the Myanmar Times, which has repeatedly served as a platform for contributors seeking to blame the victims of Myanmar’s human rights atrocities for their own deaths and expulsions. Last September, the paper published and then deleted an article by a former Myanmar diplomat that blamed foreign media for damaging the country’s reputation by “exaggerating the exodus of Bengalis from Myanmar.”
The paper, which is run by Thein Tun’s granddaughter Fiona, has also suffered from a rapid rotation of editors and foreign staff over the last two years. Once Myanmar’s English-language paper of record, the Myanmar Times now has a reputation shaped by the firing and resignations of reporters who have refused to be censored.
At the time of his Forbes interview in May, Thein Tun had just returned to Yangon after a trip to Chennai to interview a candidate for the editor-in-chief post at the paper – a position that remains vacant.
Truth Seeker says
Why insert reference to the Bengali situation into almost every article that comes out of RGN? Do you have substantiating information other than what could very well be fake news being disseminated by the world media, which is following its usual practice of reporting almost precisely what every competitor is saying? I eagerly await the original reporting Coconuts surely is preparing which provides detailed first-hand facts that substantiate your obvious belief that the Myanmar army engaged in a systematic effort to rid all of the country of Muslims. Who is the crazy person on your staff that has such blind hatred of the army that they are obsessed with this situation to the extent that they undermine most of the reporting that you do?